2025: True West by Sam Shepard

 

True West by Sam Shepard.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, September 8 – October 11, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 21

Playwright: Sam Shepard
Director: Iain Sinclair; Assistant Director: Anna Houston

    Cast
Mom - Vanessa Downing
Austin - Darcy Kent
Saul Kimmer - James Lugton
Lee - Simon Maiden

Set & Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Brockman; Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley; Fight Director: Scott Witt
Stage Manager: Christopher Starnawski                                Asst Stage Manager: Bella Wellstead  Costume Supervisor: Renata Beslik

By arrangement with Music Theatre International (Australasia)

95mins (no interval)    Recommended for ages 14+
 

 Photos by Prudence Upton

Mom - Vanessa Downing, arrives home unexpectedly

Saul Kimmer - James Lugton,  Lee - Simon Maiden confront Austin - Darcy Kent
about doing a movie script-writing deal

______________________________________________________________

Donald Trump said today, in what should have been a solemn commemoration of the life and shooting death of Charlie Kirk, that he disagreed with Kirk on one point – that Charlie never hated those who opposed him. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said of Kirk. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry,” Trump added. “I am sorry, Erika”, speaking to Kirk’s grief-stricken wife. [independent.co.uk]

What’s worse is that Trump sounded as if he was making a joke of the core American default state of mind – violence in word and deed.

Sam Shepard understood it was not a joke when he wrote True West in 1980 – nearly half a century ago.  Though the play is famous, I’m embarrassed to say that I had known nothing about it before seeing Ensemble’s presentation.  For the final fifteen minutes and for long after leaving the theatre, I was literally in a state of shock.  

The performances by Darcy Kent and Simon Maiden, directed with such accurate precision by Iain Sinclair (whose work I saw in his younger days in his Elbow Theatre, here in Canberra) was quite extraordinary, achieving all, perhaps even more, than Shepard could ever have wished for.
 

 

Lee confronts Austin with the toast made in toasters Austin has stolen
to satisfy Lee's earlier challenge that the intellectual Austin couldn't do practical things.

Lee teases Austin with the keys of Austin's car

 

 

Which, on reflection, makes his play as important today, here in Australia, as it was in his America.  Shepard said [ http://www.sam-shepard.com/truewest.html ] "I wanted to write a play about double nature, one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with."

But what Donald Trump and this frightening production shows is that True West is powerfully symbolic and metaphorical precisely because it is more than a mere taste of what it feels like to be two-sided.  The most awful feeling in the play is at the moment when the two brothers are at the point of killing each other as their Mom arrives home unexpectedly from what she had hoped would be a holiday.

She doesn’t seem really surprised to find her house almost destroyed in their drunken mayhem. It’s just something she’s got to live with, apparently.  Just like we have to live with Trump’s hatred which will tear the whole world apart.

 

Austin has lost his sense of propriety, and now behaves like his profligate brother Lee
shortly before their Mom arrives home.

 

As I searched for others’ views, I couldn’t do better than this, from Misha Berson written in 1997:

"'True West' isn't just a combustive slam dance of warring brothers. It also animates the psychic struggle of self and shadow self, and it makes vivid the unbridgeable split in the American West mythos between unfettered individualism and mainstream success, wide open space and subdivided wilderness. The play is inconclusive. It offers no healing of such divisions, no integration. It just lays out its contradictions with high-voltage dramatic force. It rocks, and reverbs."   ...Misha Berson, Seattle Times theater critic.

30 years later, we – in Australia – on social media and in the face of destructive climate change which we have caused ourselves;  do we not see that contradiction between unfettered individualism (in Lee) and the insistence on mainstream success (in movie producer Saul Kimmer), and between the wide open space of the natural world and the subdividing of the wilderness?

The shooting of Charlie Kirk has filled our news with arguments about political violence and gun control, as the Minister for the Environment struggles to control the expansion of the gas industry which has already awfully damaged the ancient heritage of Murujuga in Western Australia.

While a “sovereign citizen” has gone bush after killing police in Victoria – the Australian version of Sam Shepard’s characters (and apparently his own father) going to the desert to escape social responsibility.

Ensemble’s True West is quite simply a fantastic production, but be prepared for its powerful emotional effect on a personal level, and for the truth of its story on the wider social level.

Definitely not to be missed.  This is theatre art at its best.

 

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: How to Plot a Hit in Two Days by Melanie Tait

 

 

https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/how-to-plot-a-hit-in-two-days/

How to Plot a Hit in Two Days by Melanie Tait.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, August 29 – October 11, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 13

Playwright: Melanie Tait
Director: Lee Lewis; Assistant Director: Tiffany Wong
    
Set & Costume Design: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Design: Brockman; Composer & Sound Design: Paul Charlier
Stage Manager: Jen Jackson; Assistant Stage Manager: Sherydan Simson
Costume Supervisor: Renata Beslik

This production is made possible by the Commissioners’ Circle and The Tracey Trinder Playwright's Award.

Cast
 Sharon – Amy Ingram
 Dell – Genevieve Lemon
 Bert – Seán O'Shea
 Judy – Georgie Parker
 Sally – Julia Robertson



Turning the death of Molly into a heart-warming comedy was a stroke of genius on Melanie Tait’s part.

For anyone else as ignorant as me, who never watched A Country Practice, the crucial question is, Did Molly Really Die?

As serendipity would have it, my wife and I missed our usual appointment to watch ABC TV’s 7.30 just last Monday.  You can watch it now, at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-08/behind-molly%E2%80%99s-heartbreaking-death-on-a-country/105750504 celebrating 40 years since Molly’s “heartbreaking death” as “a new play goes inside the writer’s room to reveal how that heartbreaking storyline was created. Richard Mockler brings us this story” including interviewing the actors, Anne Tenney (Molly) and Shane Withington (her husband, Brendan).

So the answer to that crucial question is complicated.  Molly was a fictional character, so “iconic” that she still hasn’t died in our cultural memory.  But that’s only because she really did die, in that fiction.

And now, Melanie Tait – who is obviously very real – has created her fictional story of the group of writers, as she imagined them, who created the fictional Molly for the very real Anne Tenney to act, 40 years ago.  In deciding, over many fraught sessions, about how to “kill” Molly, Tait’s writers find themselves imagining why Anne has decided to leave the show, and so create for them this awful task of writing Molly out.  Was it just for a better paid acting job somewhere else?

The real Anne doesn’t say in the 7.30 interview, but does say “They coined my character mad Molly, for some reason or other. She was very involved in local issues and very environmentally aware.” Hmm!

 

Writers Team: 
Julia Robertson whose other job is ICU Nurse, Sally, 
who has seen someone die from leukemia.
Georgie Parker as Judy, the final writer who "kills" Molly.

Writers Team:
Genevieve Lemon as Dell Isn't there another character we could make a theatre critic
and get Judy to kill? (The Mirror's Woeful Theatre Section revolting little man)
Seán O'Shea as Bert, whose wife takes off with a camera grip on a film shoot in Darwin.
Georgie Parker as Judy

Amy Ingram as Sharon, in full motorcycle gear.
Full rock star/former jail inmate vibes.

In the end the important thing, as you watch Melanie Tait’s imagination made real before your very eyes by the terrific top-quality actors, so precisely directed in every detail of lifted eyebrow, rolled eyes, widened eyes and clarity of ironic speech, the real answer is that at many points you will die laughing.

But in the end you will be seriously impressed by Tait’s skill making humour telling.  A Country Practice  may have been a commercial television soapie, but the way that team of writers finally came up with the way Molly dies – maintaining for the audience not just a conventional sentimentality about her unfortunate passing, but a positive view of her life as a mother and wife – turned A Country Practice into a positive social force.

The play, How to Plot a Hit in Two Days, is wonderfully enjoyable to watch, especially because the group of writers, each quite different personalities, work so well together, understanding each others’ feelings about problematic situations in their own lives which arise from working out the effects on people who will watch Molly’s death – from understanding medical issues (she dies from leukemia), social and family issues, and environmental issues (after all, it’s a country practice).

The theatre company is not called Ensemble for nothing.  This is an ensemble production of the best kind – light-hearted in performance and strong-hearted in effect.

As the playscript says (it includes the program, for $10: Currency Press), This isn’t your average conference room.  It’s where writers are expected to come up with ideas, so it’s comfortable, lived in and welcoming.  Indeed it is.

Certainly not to be missed.
 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Peter/Wendy by Jeremy Bloom

 

 

Peter/Wendy by Jeremy Bloom. Ribix Productions and Lexi Sekuless Productions at Mill Theatre, Dairy Road, Canberra, September 3-27, 2025.

Presented as part of the Mill Theatre Co-Production Series, a program which provides an avenue for creatives to present their own work in the Mill Theatre space.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 10

Cast

In alphabetical order:
Wendy U/S, Swing: Aleksis Andreitchenko (she/her)
Wendy: Veronica Baroulina (she/her)
Tinker Bell: Chipz (they/them)
Lost Boy: Phoebe Fielden (she/her)
Tiger Lily:    Sarah Hartley (she/her)
Peter Pan: Joshua James (he/him)
Mr Darling/Smee: Mark Lee (he/him)
Mrs Darling/Hook: Heidi Silberman (she/her)


Creative Team

Writer: Jeremy Bloom; Director: Rachel Pengilly (she/her)
Movement Director: Hannah Pengilly (she/her)
Composer & Sound Designer: Shannon Parnell (she/her)
Set & Costume Designer: Helen Wojtas (she/her)
Lighting Designer: Jacob Aquilina (he/him)
Stage Manage: Hannah Pengilly (she/her)
Assistant Stage Managers: Sophie Hope-White (she/her) & Ciara Ford (she/her)
Intimacy Coordinator: Chipz (they/them)
Marketing and Publicity: Liv Blucher (she/her)
Vocal Coach: Lexi Sekuless (she/her)
Singing Tutor: Petronella van Tienen (she/her)
Consulting Artist: Julia Grace (she/her)

Co-Producers: Ribix Productions and Lexi Sekuless Productions by permission of ORiGiN™ Theatrical on behalf of Playscripts, Inc and Broadway Licensing Global

Principal Sponsor: Willard Public Affairs; Media Partner: Darkhorse Creative

Further credits found here: https://www.ribixproductions.com.au/peter-wendy/


You can read the original playscript of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300081h.html 
Or you can also read the book called Peter and Wendy at https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Peter_and_Wendy/yhbTEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA2&printsec=frontcover

Peter/Wendy seems to have drawn on both.  J M Barrie writes as if he, in reality, is living in a fantasy land.  His play has hugely long stage directions which seem impossible to fulfill, while his novel describes the characters in excruciating psychological details that are hard to accept.

At this point in my reading, Barrie seems either an early 20th Century absurdist or an unpleasant social satirist.

At https://www.playscripts.com/play/2714 you will find Jeremy Bloom’s script, “adapted from the works of J M Barrie”, which is described as a “lyrical, atmospheric interpretation of Peter Pan, [in which] Jeremy Bloom strips the familiar story down to its emotional essence. Peter lures Wendy away from her nursery to the magical world of Neverland, where she joins his adventures with Tinker Bell, Tiger Lily, and the menacing Captain Hook. A low-tech, inventive adaptation that pays homage to the darker themes of J. M. Barrie's original”.

And I am pleased to report that Rachel Pengilly and her team of designers and actors have succeeded in creating that ‘emotional essence’ in the relationship between Wendy and the faeries, and reveal the need in an imaginative young daughter to psychologically escape the ‘standard’ parents’ assumptions about parenting.  They are not the darlings that their name suggests.

This justifies a positive answer to the question we might ask: why present stage material written in that ‘different country’ more than 100 years ago?  It’s because that need for escape – to grow up – is as relevant today as then; and perhaps more so in a world where a modern Peter will be on Wendy’s social media feed, while her parents have no idea of the Captain Hooks and Tinker Bells she come across.  It’s a worry – and we feel it as Peter/Wendy ends as the dawn begins.

On the practical theatre side, the set design, the detailed complex choreography in using all the symbolic items of Peter’s world of adventures, and the lighting and sound, created the fantasy world very successfully, showing a high degree of originality which, for me, solved those stage direction difficulties I saw in Barrie’s script.

Especially important, and highly successful was the casting.  Apart from all the tricky acting in the fast moving changes for the whole cast, Wendy and Peter looked and felt absolutely right in their parts.

The Mill Theatre writes it is “excited to announce the first co-production of 2025”, and I say the more the merrier, especially for the young people on stage and in the audience.  This production is full of life, auguring well for the future of Ribix Productions.

Veronica Baroulina as Wendy
in Peter/Wendy
Ribix Productions, 2025

 

 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Hidden Canberra - Shortis&Simpson

 

 

 Hidden Canberra by John Shortis and Moya Simpson as Shortis&Simpson at Smith’s Alternative, Canberra City,  Saturday, September 6, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone


I feel somehow like an archaeologist discovering a new site in a cultural landscape, digging up a cultural artefact, recorded in mystery as a ‘Shortis&Simpson’.

Whatever it is, it’s equally funny and fascinating.  Radiocarbon datings of Shortis&Simpsons show them going back nearly 30 years to a site then known as the School of Arts Cafe, Queanbeyan, and they have been found in many similar cultural sites over the years.

Smith’s Alternative – the one-time bookshop, now arts coffee-shop – have provided an accurate rundown of this new example:

“John Shortis and Moya Simpson moved to the Canberra region from Sydney in 1996. John fell instantly in love with a place where history and politics popped up everywhere he looked. For Moya it was where her passion for world music and voices flourished.

 “Hidden Canberra is their tribute to the city and environs, where their creativity has been able to blossom for nearly 30 years.

“With a bunch of original and collected songs, an array of projected images, and a witty and informative script, the wildly interesting and quirky depth of the capital region comes to life.

“Stories of a rainbow coloured airport, a right wing pollie once a serious Canberra punk, public art, musical street names, Lake George as a capital city, and much, much more. And you thought you knew Canberra…Hidden Canberra is Shortis and Simpson’s funny, moving, surprising love letter to the weird and wonderful town that they proudly call home.”

Ken Behrens all will remember the Artificial Intelligence that produced that wonderful failure to translate the spoken word into digital text.  It wasn’t done originally as the joke it became, but in their song about its history,  Canberrans John and Moya tapped right into the mix of feelings we have about ourselves at home in Australia’s National Capital.  Outsiders, who send their parliamentary representatives here, wouldn’t understand how we combine the serious matters of state with a sense of Australian ironic humour about ourselves that the song sparked in the audience.  What an exciting archaeological dig that was.  We found a road warning sign: STAY SAFE  KEN BEHRENS.

The script for Act 1 is 22 pages long; and 23 pages for Act 2. So I can only reveal a few snippets.  This is how the story begins:

We talk of a city that’s freezing and hot,
Where threads of progressiveness thicken the plot
Where humour and hist’ry and knowledge are not
Forbidden…..
We walk through a city where legends abound
Gleaming and dreaming, both light and profound
Where the heart of a nation is beating its sound
In hidden…Canberra

It’s a gentle beginning, but notice rhyming the slightly syncopated “not / Forbidden” with “In hidden...Canberra”.  This is John’s so-called ‘quirky’ song writing, particularly familiar to those, like myself, who have followed Shortis&Simpson since 1996.  It’s not just the words of the songs, nowadays sung with even more variety of character and clarity of articulation as Moya’s voice has matured, but it’s the oddities of rhyme and rhythm in John’s essentially jazz-based approach in his music that keeps us on the qui vive.

So the singing of Section 125 of the Australian Constitution with lines like

The seat of government of the Commonwealth
Shall be determined by Parliament.
Such territory shall contain an area
Not less than one hundred square miles,
And such portion thereof
As shall consist of Crown lands,
Shall be granted to the Commonwealth
Without any payment therefore,
The Parliament shall sit at Melbourne
Till it meet at the seat of government

(i.e. Canberra, which didn’t exist when the Constitution was written)

in John’s musical hands comes to seem like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Then the show takes us through a series of songs which reminded me of the weekly Tim the Yowie Man (in the Canberra Times’ Panorama) quest for people to identify a photo of somewhere obscure, often resulting in a hidden historical story – such as this weekend as I write, about Is this the smallest railway platform?

There’s the story of how the Australian Capital Territory voted, on a metre long ballot paper full of party names like the Warm Tomato Party, or The Party Party, against self-government (eat your heart out, Washington, in your days of Donald Trump).  

Politicians’ Statues are a big thing – especially the very few of women: the first to be elected, not until  1943 mind-you, Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney, facing the lack of women’s loos in Parliament House.  The theme was developed in the much later story of the Canberra Alpine Club’s Mount Franklin Hut on the Brindabella Range border with New South Wales, where for sewerage reasons - to keep Canberra's water clean - the women had to walk interstate:

But if you stay
At our Chalet,
Be sure your pissport’s up to date
‘Cause you’ll be headed interstate
To have a spray
Heed what I say
Show your I-Dee-ee-ee
Whenever you wee-ee-ee
Show your I-Dee-ee-ee
When you leave the A-ay C-ee-Tee-ee

Enough for now I should say, except for the one song, about the invention of the QASAR electronic keyboard, first shown in the 1970s at Llewellyn Hall at the School of Music, which the Australian National University seems likely to close down very soon.  There was no laughter this time:

John sings - 
A centre of sound
Climbing
Careering
Bathe in a wave
That’s never disappearing
(Moya oohs in background)
Ground breaking
Risk-taking
Trail blazer
QASAR

Save the ANU School of Music! says everyone.
 

Though there’s another hour to go in the show, I shall come to the end here, with the beginning.  Near the ACT, on the Sydney side, is Lake George, famous for its rapidly changing water levels from undergound sources.  I’ve seen it almost entirely dry, or flooding onto the main road, the Federal Highway, in different years.  Here’s the script:

John speaks –

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, when the call was made for nominations for Australia’s capital city, Lake George was actually proposed. Here’s an artist’s impression of what the lake could look like in that role- Venice meets Lake George.

Only problem being that when a team of senators came to inspect the site, the enigmatic lake did its thing and the water that is so prolific in that design was virtually non-existent.

Fortunately, instead of looking like a European city of long ago, we now have a pristine and important part of our environment, sacred for the indigenous people of our district. 

This is the song John wrote for The Universal Lake in 1998.

Moya sings – of the traditional custodians of this land, the Ngunnawal and Ngamberri peoples, who know Lake George, named after King George IV, as Weereewa.  You see the origin of the name, Canberra, right there.

Ancient lake, eight million years,
Ancient land, salt in the tears,
Grassy bank, inland sea,
Stone unturned, mystery,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa,

Muddy bed, emu bone,
Bogong moth, pumice stone,
Sudden squall, choppy sea,
Waterweed, eucalypt tree,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa
Ngamberri, Weereewa,
Ngarrigo, Gandangarra, Wiradjari,
Walbinga, Wandandian, Wiradjuri, 

Level fall, level rise,
Frozen death, boat capsize,
Charcoal burn, kangaroo,
Mine the sand, steal the view,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa    

Moya Simpson and John Shortis
in love with Canberra

©Frank McKone, Canberra